When Love and Pride Collide

Tagged as: cities, depression, love, memories

Culver City, December 2008.

Love is to hold a per­son in the high­est pos­si­ble regard. It is an unstop­pable force. Pride is to hold one­self in the high­est pos­si­ble regard. It is an immov­able object. That is all good and well, until the first col­lides with the sec­ond.

So the ques­tion is: What hap­pens when an unstop­pable force col­lides with an immov­able object?

Well, in philoshopi­cal terms, this has been addressed as part of the omnipo­tence para­dox, sim­i­lar to the ques­tion “Can God cre­ate a stone so heavy it can­not be lift­ed, not even by God Himself?” which we of course real­ize is a self-con­tra­dic­tion. In phys­i­cal terms, sci­ence fic­tion author Isaac Asimov posit­ed the answer that there would be an “end­less trans­fer of ener­gy.” In prac­ti­cal terms, there would sim­ply be a very big explo­sion :).

However, I’m more inter­est­ed in the ques­tion as I ini­tial­ly posed it: What hap­pens when love col­lides with pride? As far as I’m con­cerned, the answer is depres­sion.

A wise man (yes he had a white beard and round spec­ta­cles — he real­ly did!) once explained it to me like so: Depression is like a mouse trapped in a small room. Its ini­tial reac­tion is to man­i­cal­ly scratch at the walls until it real­izes its help­less­ness, then it curls into a ball and cow­ers in the cor­ner, refus­ing all food and water.

For a long time I thought that was the only answer, and con­tin­ue to believe so. However, the prob­lem lies not in the answer, but in the ques­tion itself. Indeed, the answer to the ques­tion “What hap­pens when love col­lides with pride?” is in fact “depres­sion.” But if we take the ques­tion back to its ori­gins as an unstop­pable force col­lid­ing with an immov­able object, then we real­ize that it is only hypo­thet­i­cal, for there are no unstop­pable forces in the uni­verse and there are no immov­able objects. A sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tion of why that seems to be the case is beyond the scope of this blog, but the uni­verse would sim­ply be impos­si­ble oth­er­wise.

Therefore, any love that is con­sid­ered unstop­pable in the face of pride is not love at all, but obses­sion. Similarly, any pride that does not yield to the force of love is not pride, but stub­born­ness. And no one wor­thy of my love would ever pit it against my pride.

I first asked myself this ques­tion in the back seat of a cab tak­ing me from Los Angeles Airport to my apart­ment in Culver City, December 2008.